บททั้งหมดของ MASKS AND ILLUSIONS : บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

OLIVIA’S POV. For three days straight, younger me had eaten nothing but cereal. Mum was too tired from crying her eyes out all day to even make me a proper meal. For long, I used to think of the day I would see my mother again. I had created a lot of excuses for her in my head and tried to be an understanding person. I only ever remembered bits of what happened when dad died. I never remembered the constant neglect from the woman I called mum. Dad died and took our happiness alongside. Mine and Mum's. It was a tragic incident, and we both felt the impact of it deeply. Like a part of our soul was chipped away. I'm still trying to understand Mum right now, as I stare at her from behind. She's seated on the couch, holding the last photo dad took of all of us together in the kitchen. If I held that picture and I was her, I would put it down later on and check my kid. I wouldn't want my kid to feel the pain I'm feeling. I would try to be happy so that my kid never feels the effec

Olivia’s POV The first thing that settled over me was confusion. Thick, heavy, relentless confusion. I was home. But I couldn’t shake off the fact that Daniel is just missing. My father had died in the kitchen. I remembered the way he had collapsed, how they rushed him to the hospital. Yet now, now the hospital claimed he had never been there. No record. Nothing. It didn’t make sense. I lingered in the living room, my mind thrashing against itself. Had I imagined it? Had grief twisted the memory? No. I could still see it, I literally just saw it happen again. And then there was Taylor. I turned my gaze toward her. She sat hunched at the edge of the couch, eyes fixed on nothing, a cigarette lit between her fingers. She's broken. Her face was blotchy from crying, her body folded inward. Smoking, in a house, with a five year old child. But what gutted me wasn’t the grief. It was the absence. Taylor wasn’t asking questions. She wasn’t demanding answers from the doctors, wasn’t

OLIVIA’S POV. Darkness folds around me, soft and endless, yet my mind will not stay quiet. Something keeps me hovering between nowhere and then, like I’m drifting through the thin skin of a dream I can’t wake from. I’m walking through memory as if it’s a real place. The apartment hallway stretches ahead, narrow and yellowed, the paint curling at the edges like old paper. The air smells faintly of dust and warm metal from the radiator. A single bulb hums above me. I stand at the threshold of my childhood. Little me sits in the middle of the living room floor, legs folded, head bent in quiet concentration. She doesn’t look up. She never does. Her world is a scattered circle of toys, plastic beads, a stuffed bear missing one ear, a chipped coffee table where she’s lined up three cups like they’re guests at a tea party. The refrigerator rumbles and clicks, nearly empty inside. I don’t call out. I couldn’t, even if I tried. She’s five years old and entirely alone. A b

DANIELLA’S POV. The city had quieted to a low mechanical hum by the time I reached my apartment, but the noise inside my head was another story entirely. I let the door swing shut behind me and pressed my back against it, palms flat to the cool wood as though I could keep the night, and everything I’d just overheard, on the other side. No luck. The words followed me in like smoke. They clung to me, every syllable etched into my chest. I hadn’t realized how fast I’d driven until the silence of my apartment wrapped around me. My heartbeat was still a sprint, loud enough that it seemed to bounce off the walls. I kicked off my shoes, each thud of heel to hardwood a small act of defiance, but the sound only sharpened the ache behind my temples. I paced the living room once, twice, again. The lamp in the corner threw a soft cone of gold over the couch, catching on the framed photo, shots of street murals, a polaroid of me and Olivia from a night that suddenly felt a thousand year

Daniella’s POV The first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes was the light, sliding through the blinds. The second thing was the knot in my neck from sleeping half-sitting against the arm of the couch. Sometime during the night I’d given up on the bed and drifted off here, still in yesterday’s T-shirt, the phone that had stolen most of my sleep facedown on the coffee table. I lay still for a minute, listening. The building hummed its usual morning soundtrack, a pipe clanking as someone showered upstairs, the muffled scrape of a neighbour’s chair, a distant car horn. The phone was within reach. I didn’t touch it. Instead, I forced myself upright, stretching until my shoulders popped and padded to the kitchen. The tiles were cold under my bare feet, a small shock that helped shake off the fog. I filled the kettle and set it on the stove. Last night’s text hovered at the edge of my mind anyway. I’d read it three times before finally setting the phone face-down, telling